It Won't Be Long
by Daria234
Summary: Sylar/Claire futurefic. It's a Jekyll and Hyde situation, and it changes both of them. Warnings for very dark themes and graphic violence.


Written for comment_fic on livejournal

Prompt was C/S Jekyll and Hyde

A noise in the basement. Boxes falling, perhaps. A mouse topping over a shelf.

Or perhaps it was her. Perhaps she was changing.

Sylar closed his eyes. He felt that maybe if he was perfectly still, she might, just this once, ignore him. Take her wrath out some other way. But even as he hoped for this, he knew she could hear his heartbeat quicken with fear.

Sylar thought for a moment about how he had gotten here. He remembered the day he found that special boy who could copy and transfer powers. He thought that would be a new beginning, a new Sylar, who wouldn't have to kill.

And it did bring a new Sylar. But it also brought a new Claire. She looked up at him with her big soft eyes and asked if she could have some powers. Sylar would still have them, it's just that Claire would have some too. She loved him so much, she said, that she just wanted enough powers that she could go with him and help him gather other specials.

It was too hard to say no to his bride of a hundred years. He gave her everything except his original power, not wanting her to suffer through its side effects.

But something went wrong. He must have picked up some power long ago that he had forgotten about, something stored in him that had passed by his notice for many decades. Something that could restore erased memories.

And now Claire knew. Not all the time, just intermittently. Once in a while, at utterly unpredictable times. She would remember.

All the things he did in the previous century. To her fathers. To her uncle and grandmother. To her friends, and boyfriends, and just about every kind soul who tried to offer her help and refuge from him.

She would remember. And she would lash out at him with a fury that terrified him. She would cut path after path of destruction on his body, relentless and cruel and vengeful. He couldn't kill the woman he loved, but there were times when he wished he had the strength to. The one time he had even fought back, even tried to resist, she left a post-nuclear crater where the city had been, with the two of them being the only survivors.

So he didn't resist any more. He took it. Suffered and screamed and took it, until she collapsed sobbing on the floor. And then she would wake up and gaze into his eyes, and ask why he looked so upset.

He would tell her nothing.

Sylar tried to tell himself that the good moments made it all worth it. He always healed from what she did. And really, didn't he deserve what Claire took from him, after all he took from her.

But still, Sylar wondered what would happen if he tried to escape. If he tried to leave her, and the monster he had made of her. If he could imagine a future free of these twinned girls, the one who made him shudder with pleasure, and the one who made him shudder with fear. It wasn't right, Sylar knew, for a being like himself to sit in his own home, trembling and huddled, waiting for his bride to come up the basement stairs and knock him senseless with agony.

It wasn't right, Sylar knew. But he also knew he no longer had the courage to run away from her. He would probably be bound to her for the next thousand years.

So it seemed that both of them were becoming different people. Corrupted versions of their earlier, better selves.

As the door to the basement flung open, Sylar saw the power gathering in her left hand and flinched at the coming radiation burns. 'It will be over soon,' he told himself, 'you can survive another night. And then Claire will be back. The one who is sweet and loving and thinks you are the best man in the world.' Sylar cried out at the metal spikes driven into his thigh, and again as she froze them until they shattered inside of his flesh. 'Just a few hours,' he told himself, 'You can survive a few hours. And then you'll have Claire back. The one who needs you. The one who loves you. The one who doesn't have any idea who you are.' He started sobbing as she boiled his hands. 'It will be over soon. This pain won't last forever. It will be over soon.'


End file.
